Traditional means for reading barcodes involve a laser beam crossing over a barcode symbol from its beginning to its end. More advanced means for reading barcodes eliminate the need for a laser beam to completely traverse a barcode symbol in favor of acquiring a plurality of partial signals and reconstructing them to form the complete symbol. In addition to finding start signal portions and pure decoding, the crux of the reconstruction process is the matching task that, through an often complex set of heuristic rules, identifies a portion of the already partially reconstructed barcode symbol to match element-by-element, according to defined criteria, with a comparable acquired partial barcode signal.